Characterizing and comparing the vital attributes of occupations has been an important part of the field of labor economics for many years. During the past decade, two major databases of occupational information have become the most widely known and used sources of occupation profiles and attribute comparison. Following are detailed descriptions of these two databases, which in turn are key information sources of TORQ, the invention described in this application. Additionally, several other systematic attempts have been made to approach the concept of occupational comparison and job transfer. The most significant of those efforts are described here.
O*NET
O*NET™ refers to the U.S. Department of Labor's Occupational Information Network. O*NET's taxonomy of occupations is an extension of the occupation labels developed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) system.
For example, as of late 2008, O*NET's database provided detailed data on 809 separate officially defined occupations. Each of these occupations is associated with a set of descriptors according to the O*NET Content Model, derived from detailed observation and analysis of job characteristics of each described occupation. O*NET's database is periodically reviewed and updated to include information on new and emerging occupations. The current version, as of late 2011, is O*NET 16.
The O*NET Content Model includes all six of the domains listed below, together with all of the descriptors there under which are associated with each of O*NET's listed occupations:                Worker Characteristics—enduring characteristics that may influence both work performance and the capacity to acquire knowledge and skills required for effective work performance.                    Abilities—Enduring attributes of the individual that influence performance.            Occupational Interests—Preferences for work environments. Occupational Interest Profiles (OIPs) are compatible with Holland's (1985, 1997) model of personality types and work environments.            Work Values—Global aspects of work composed of specific needs that are important to a person's satisfaction. Occupational Reinforcer Patterns (ORPs) are based on the Theory of Work Adjustment (Dawis & Lofquist, 1984).            Work Styles—Personal characteristics that can affect how well someone performs a job.                        Worker Requirements—descriptors referring to work-related attributes acquired and/or developed through experience and education.                    Basic Skills—Developed capacities that facilitate learning or the more rapid acquisition of knowledge            Cross-Functional Skills—Developed capacities that facilitate performance of activities that occur across jobs.            Knowledge—Organized sets of principles and facts applying in general domains.            Education—Prior educational experience required to perform in a job.                        Experience Requirements—requirements related to previous work activities and explicitly linked to certain types of work activities.                    Experience and Training—If someone were being hired to perform this job, how much of the following would be required?            Basic Skills—Entry Requirement—Entry requirement for developed capacities that facilitate learning or the more rapid acquisition of knowledge.            Cross-Functional Skills—Entry Requirement—Entry requirement for developed capacities that facilitate performance of activities that occur across jobs.            Licensing—Licenses, certificates, or registrations that are awarded to show that a job holder has gained certain skills. This includes requirements for obtaining these credentials, and the organization or agency requiring their possession.                        Occupation-Specific Information—variables or other Content Model elements of selected or specific occupations.                    Tasks—Occupation-Specific Tasks.            Tools and Technology—Machines, equipment, tools, software, and information technology workers may use for optimal functioning in a high performance workplace.                        Labor Market Characteristics—variables that define and describe the general characteristics of occupations that may influence occupational requirements.                    Labor Market Information—Information related to economic conditions and labor force characteristics of occupations.            Occupational Outlook—Projections of future economic conditions and labor force characteristics of occupations.                        Occupational Requirements—a comprehensive set of variables or detailed elements that describe what various occupations require.                    Generalized Work Activities—General types of job behaviors occurring on multiple jobs.            Detailed Work Activities—Detailed types of job behaviors occurring on multiple jobs.            Organizational Context—Characteristics of the organization that influence how people do their work.            Work Context—Physical and social factors that influence the nature of work.                        
The information O*NET provides about each occupation is exhaustive and comprehensive. The multiple dimensions of occupational attributes cataloged by O*NET make the description of each occupation both extremely rich and highly complex. A table listing the major and minor components of the O*NET database and their hierarchical relationships is presented in FIG. 3.
Researchers attempting to make use of the O*NET database have been accordingly limited in their ability to embrace the entire set of data in several kinds of studies involving career transfer and career paths. Most efforts to make productive use of the O*NET database have only encompassed one or a few dimensions of O*NET occupational data, or have merely repackaged O*NET data verbatim within various graphic and/or tabular displays or reports.
WORKKEYS®
Another database of Skills and Abilities by occupation is provided by ACT, Inc. and which is known as WORKKEYS®. WORKKEYS provides a more concise set of groupings of Skills and Abilities—eight (8) groupings in all. Each of these categories—e.g. Applied Mathematics or Locating Information—is rated on a 0-7 scale. Like O*NET's occupational attributes, the information supplied by WORKKEYS is derived from a system of job profiling based on detailed observation and interviewing.
The major advantage of WORKKEYS is that it also features a worker assessment component, whereby individuals take tests to determine their personal skill levels in each of the crucial WORKKEYS dimensions. This component is highly useful to business recruiters and workforce and human resource professionals wishing to match individuals to job opportunities. The combination of career-to-career comparison and individual-to-career comparison has made WORKKEYS a preferred database for occupational information among the world of workforce development, despite the relative thinness of its occupational information compared to O*NET.
Transferable Skills and Gap Analysis
The concept of “transferable skills” has been the subject of a great deal of research and exploration among labor economists as well as among workforce and economic developers. From the workforce development standpoint, evaluating transferable skills has long been the concern of those tasked with finding new employment opportunities for displaced workers, whether individually or in the case of a mass layoff or plant closing. For economic developers, quickly assessing transferable skills present in a region's workforce is important to efforts to recruit and retain businesses.
Additionally, the interests of workforce development would be well served by a reliable method for assessing the skills present in a region's workforce. Much has been made lately of the importance of “skills gap analysis” as a tool for assessing the condition of local workforces, and preparing a region's workforce for 21st-century economy occupations. Most such efforts, however, have found that, while estimating shortages for individual occupations is relatively easy, given plentiful public employment information, it is much more difficult to assess the skills of an area's labor force in a similar way, absent an exhaustive community survey or other such expensive measures.
Career Ladders, Lattices, and Pathways
Related to the idea of skills transfer is the construction of networks that are variously known as career ladders, lattices, and/or pathways. These models of the interconnections between careers in similar fields or requiring similar Skill/Ability/Knowledge sets are designed for and used by guidance and employment counselors and human resources professionals to illustrate the possibilities offered by particular career and/or educational choices.
The various labels for these career maps imply different approaches to the network of career relationships. A career ladder indicates a more or less linear progression of education and experience in jobs of similar natures in the same or similar industries. A career lattice is a more inclusive set of occupations, based on relationships of skills, education levels, abilities, earnings, industries, and many other bases of comparison. A career path or pathway, then, describes any set of interconnected occupations within this larger career lattice.
It has historically been more difficult to construct a career lattice than a career ladder. The career path from a Certified Nursing Assistant to a Registered Nurse is relatively straightforward, but finding occupations with comparable attributes that might supply a need for skilled warehouse workers may be more difficult. Efforts to create career lattices based on observed O*NET or WORKKEYS attributes have been attempted, but none so far has taken a comprehensive view of these attributes with statistical rigor and precision that embraces the entire data set represented by either of these databases.
Competency Modeling
A close relative to the notion of career ladders and pathways is a product called a “competency model.” A U.S. Department of Labor-sponsored project called the “Competency Model Clearinghouse” has produced such models based on the Abilities, Skills, and Knowledge requirements of general employment in broad industry sectors and/or clusters, such as Information Technology, Advanced Manufacturing, and others.
These “competency models” consist of pyramidal representations of the varieties of Abilities, Skills, and Knowledge that are required for any occupation within a given industry sector or cluster. The bottom level of the pyramid contains the most basic “employability” attributes like “interpersonal skills” and “initiative.” Subsequent levels attain more and more specificity to the given industry, examining common knowledge bases required of all Information Technology professionals, for example. In the upper levels of these competency models, occupation-specific job requirements are quoted directly from O*NET.
These competency models do employ a systematic approach to their construction and definition, consisting of consultation with employers within the given industry for which the model has been constructed. This application, however, is by its nature more useful in a broader strategic sense than at the level of individual occupations. At the occupational level, competency models yield no more specific information than does raw O*NET data.